Mark Bowden Remembers ‘The Best Game Ever’ and the Birth of Sudden-Death Overtime in National Football League Championship Play

To judge by the Amazon ratings for Black Hawk Down – a total of 672 reviews, not one less than four stars – I’m among the few who thought that Mark Bowden’s account of the bungled 1993 American military raid in Somalia was overrated. So although I’m in no rush to read Bowden’s new book about the first National Football League championship game decided in sudden-death overtime, I’d like to mention the most authoritative review of it that I’ve seen so far.

Jonathan Yardley wrote of The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL (Atlantic Monthly, 279 pp., $23) in the Washington Post:

“It’s considerably more than a play-by-play account, though Bowden does manage to build up a surprising amount of suspense. Both pro football and the United States were very different half a century ago, and Bowden understands that this game caught both the league and the nation at a moment of deep and lasting change. … Early in his career Bowden covered professional football for the Philadelphia Inquirer, an experience that serves him well here. His explanations of shifts in the teams’ offensive and defensive strategies are lucid, and he knows enough about the extreme physical and mental demands the game exacts to convey a strong sense of the players’ exhaustion and determination as the game ground toward its conclusion. He isn’t entirely immune to journalistic cliché and at times overwrites, but generally his prose is competent and clear.”